Musings About Life, Universe, and Men

Menu

Tag Archives: walmart

Some of you might remember this from on my earlier posts on Chinese made goods. Wal-Mart is pulling (FINALLY) the offending flip-flops off their store shelves. Unfortunately, this comes much too late to help the people who have already experienced chemical burns from them.

We’re all still waiting to see how this is going to help the people who have burns. In some cases, these are severe as they continued to develop long after the person stopped wearing the sandals.

Well, isn’t this lovely? In addition to poisoning our pets with ground up counter top material causing massive dog food recalls and costing the makers of the dog food millions of dollars, China is now poisoning our children with lead based paint on toddler toys. So far, 967,000,000 toys are involved in the recall in the USA alone. Since there are only about 300,000,000 people, the odds that your kid or a child you know has one of these toys is very high. Lead-based paints were banned in the USA decades ago because of the effect lead has on developing children. It causes brain and physical abnormalities that will impact the child for the rest of its life.

This follows quickly on the heels of being caught exporting fake medicines for life-threatening conditions like malaria and diabetes. How’d you like to be the one taking the fake birth control pills? The head of China’s version of the FDA was executed
recently for licensing fake drugs. These covered everything from fake
antibiotics, fake AID’s drugs, and all sorts of other things. Worse
still, the fake drugs often contain just a trace of the real thing.
It’s enough to mask the symptoms and create medication resistant stains
of the illnesses they’re supposed to be treating.

Their own government admits that nearly 20% of all Chinese products fail to meet their own internal safety and quality standards, which are considerably more lax than those in the USA. Worse yet, several other countries have forced the recall of poison-tainted toothpaste made in…you guessed it, CHINA. The government there has reacted by closing 180 food factories producing things like pickles with formaldeyde and sweets laced with poison and industrial waste. That’s for consumption by their own people. One can only imagine what they’re exporting.

Even the Chinese population has taken to purchasing foreign products whenever possible, feeling that they safer and less likely to be toxic. That even applies to everyday things like food products and drinking water. Even though imported foods are never fresh and tend to be considerably more expensive, the perception from China’s own people is that foods from Japan, the US, Australia, etc. are safer to eat.

I orginally posted this on August the 3rd. Since then, a new situation has arisen with yet another Chinese import. Apparently, they’re putting toxic waste into consumer goods like flip flops. Several people have reported chemical burns due to wearing the flip flops that were purchased at Wal-Mart. If you have a strong stomach, you can flip through the photos on the link above. Despite repeated reports to Wal-Mart, the company has not removed the shoes from the store shelves and is continuing to sell them. Attempts to contact the manufacturer have been in vain.

If their own people don’t trust Chinese made products, why do we? What is it going to take before we ban imports from China? How many people are going to have to die before we get the point? Until then, do yourself a favor. If it says “Made in China”, buy something else.